this is FDRs inaugural address, it is very interesting to see how it reflects and contrasts the current president's beginning, what they said or didn't say in common... here is what i think they agree on perhaps on different time scales. and lastly as FDR was on his way out he came up with the second bill of rights here is the audio, below the footage




we just passed healthcare reform and thats the reason im posting this but it is also very interesting to note FDRs agricultural policy, his land ethic as portrayed in both speeches and how his energy bill or carbon emissions policy's might look or differ from what we are doing now

china and brazil are trying

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8586701.stm

this is encouraging isnt it? good to hear someone is working on it and that a noticeable difference can be detected

Most interesting.

I found the locally owned diner to be very appealing. There are so many fast food restaurants with crappy service that I hate even going in or through the drive area. Even the owners Tod Murphy and Pam Van Deursen go to check on the service and food. It was a plus that all the food cooked is local. Usually when one goes to a diner everything served is from a plastic bag. The diner supports farming, which is in a decline thanks to animal factories that produce products quickly but 

Shah and Malthus

Shah's essay is aiming to expand on Malthus' claims, sometimes in the form of a counterarguement. He first tackles Malthus's assumption of higher population equaling more competition, thus lower wages. He cites David Ricardo's analysis of the rich having a higher profit as wages fall. Although, they both agreed that the dropping of wages would result in a large gap between the rich and the poor.

Shah also points out the Dismla Theorum which states that "if the only check on human population is starvation, then population will grow until it starves." He calls upon welfare economists to reduce devastating hardships such as famine, disease, war, etc., which are wasteful, in order to sustain population.

Shah then points out the Mesa metaphor in which it is possible that the poor overtake the rich. The wealth gap will then be closed and society will be dominantly poor. This so happened in the French Revolution, which Shah thinks Malthus did not consider enough.

It is interesting in the last section where Shah talks about the new abundance of resources in North and South America. He argues that because the abundance of these lands' resources were just recently providing such "sustainability," Malthus's proposal would be postponed until these resources were to run out. Today, we see these resources running out. Nutritional levels are lowering with mass agriculture, as Malthus talks about in his essay.

this darn blog won't work

Shah criticizes Malthus on many points inclyuding that he does not understand people’s reasoning for having children. He also thought that Malthus’s views on tkkhe role of the givenrment in population control and how they could be mouch more influential than Malthus gave them credit for. As a survivor of the French revolution he put hardly any stock at all in the power/wisdom of the government and therefore sold it short in the eyes of shah. He clearly respects Malthus and sites him as a source of darwin’s great theory. He also criticizes Malthus’s underestimation of the New World an dit’s fertility and ability to feed populations and in fact harvest a new one. He does not wholly discount any of malthus’s writings and in fact leaves room for them to be validated but he does site that in his time he was not entirely accurate.

This is the second time i wrote this damn thing out i know it's full of typos but I don't have internet where I'm staying so I"m camped out at a neighbors and i really don't care. IN the first week youy said you'd give us a 10 minute grace period

In Malthus, "An essay on the principle of population", he states that due to the disproportional increase of the human population, this pathway will lead to high poverty, low wages for labor, and competition. He also stated due to the linear growth of the food production the gap between food and population will lead to the decline of society.
In my perspective, his assumptions are pretty close and accurate to certain situations third world countries are experiencing today. However, Shah critiques his arguments because he neglects certain aspects the prove some his arguments incorrect. In "Ecology and the Crisis of Overpopulation: Future Prospects for Global Sustainability, Shah suggest land availability and technical processes have contributed to the increase of food population Malthus refused to believe. He does agree in the idea that population growth will contribute to poverty and low wages. He refers to the rich as a fenced land in a mesa, where the poor started surrounding the fences until their increase in population starts pushing them off the mesa. This also contributes to the idea Shah has that Malthus had about when more there is more "room and resources" in the land, the families will have more children. This is not true, due to in the decline in society when Western Europe wealthy. The education contributes to the decline of population, and you can see it today in modern society. The rich and educated families are more likely to have less children, than those who are poor. Also, the developing technology played an important role in food production will led to the increase of it and more availability of it to the people.

Malthus argued in An Essay on the Principle of Population that due to the desire to breed, the population will continue to grow and exceed resource levels until the world is faced with famine, disease, etc. In Ecology and the Crisis of Overpopulation, Shah pointed out the flaws in Malthus's argument. Just because the population grows does not mean resources will run out or it will continue to increase the population. Technology has allowed rapid food production. While Shah does not rule out Mathus's outcome completely, he does state that technology is still in progress. 

not quite there yet

Malthus based his belief that human populations would outgrow their resource base on two assumptions, that "geometric population growth is the innate result of healthy living" and that "food production arithmetically increases". he failed to take into account several factors, at the time of his writting this we had not yet truly populated the new world of the old for that matter with the degree of proficiency that we later achieved, and more importantly perhaps that "the last two centuries [..] show that increases in food depend on land availability and technical progress". and here we get to the key of the matter. In Malthus' day the impact of fossil fuels on our ability to expand unencumbered by traditional restraints was unimaginable, and to be fair also the impact of birth control and of the demographic transition achieved by prosperous states is also an important factor, but i would argue from where we stand at this crosspoint that a European model of population growth for most of the world is far off or likely to fail do to outstanding variables that might affect the likelihood of such an occurrence in say India, and that as yet (only china has birth control laws) no government will set a cap on how many its citizens can bring into the world. so if a restraint remains, which i would argue it does, it lies at the bottom of every coal mine, oil well and natural gas deposit, beyond even mining the existing amounts of plastic and platinum and lithium in the worlds ever growing dumps, and even then technical progress must be reckoned with as an ever resourceful fountain of growth, until it leans to hard on biotic stability, or better said, it leans to hard before having a chance to continue its exponential growth to were such a restraint is either not met (by means that test the biosphere less) or is overcome (by means that make the degradation of key aspects of the biosphere irrelevant)...

Shah & Malthus

Malthus argued that human population increases exponentially, while food production grows only linearly, thereby outstripping necessary resources and leading to the decimation of society. Although this first seems logical, critics have noticed that critical assumptions made by Malthus only weaken his argument. Shah points out that the positive correlation between economic status and population size is not always true. In other words, you cannot reason that when people become richer, they inevitably will have more children. Also, Shah explains that Malthus fails to recognize the role technology plays in food production. While Malthus assumes that food production will lag behind the increase in population size, he fails to consider future land availability and technical progress. Although Shah focuses on making known Malthus’ faulty assumptions, he does not outright deny the possibility of a Malthusian population crisis.

Shah and Malthus

Shah mostly just points out technical flaws in Malthus’s essay; he agrees that while population increase will more than likely increase poverty rates, with low wages for labor, the rich would get richer. He alludes to the rich being a minority occupying an “affluent territory centered in the middle of the mesa, with a barbed wire fence around them” while the poor begin to crowd around them in a sea of poverty, breeding until they “push each other off the edge of the mesa.” Shah presents a second scenario not unlike the French Revolution, where the poor majorit seize the affluence and the mesa becomes a free-for-all mess of poverty. Famine is another important factor because as Malthus had mentioned, it serves as a check on population. The more people there are, the more our resources dwindle. Although Shah mentions this theory is valid—although maybe underestimating food production and consumerism—he points out that Malthus was wrong in his timing. Now, the problems of dwindling resources are quite real, but at the time Malthus’s was writing his essay, there was an entire new frontier underway. North and South America would become gateways for resources and food in the nineteenth century, which Shah claims postponed the Malthusian outcome. Shah ends his essay on a perplexing note, claiming that as Western Europe became prosperous, “fertility rates fell.” Thus the predicted Malthusian outcome may be void due to completely natural reasons.

In Shah's view, Malthus mistakenly assumed a non-existent trade-off between children and other parental consumption; this would only make sense if children were viewed as a vehicle for "hereditary immortality" and consumer goods. Secondly, Malthus believed that an increase in population leads to greater competition for jobs which means lower wages, leading to an increase in the rent for land. Using English political economist David Ricardo as a rebuttal, Ricardo argued that the fall in wages resulting from a rise in population would lead to an increase in profits. After this, Shah describes Kenneth Boulding's Dismal and Utterly Dismal theorems to encapsulate a couple of Malthus' theories. Next, Shah argues that Malthus' assumption that food production arithmetically increases is wrong. Then, Shah presents evidence from the past two centuries, showing that increases in food production depend on land availability and technical progress. Even more important, Malthus underestimated the agricultural potential of the New World. Lastly, the European demographic transition to prosperity lowered fertility rates.

Fishies

Stewart Udall secretary of interior under JFK dies